A Recommendation of Tolerance

                I recently finished reading a book. To those of you who are now sarcastically applauding; shut up. Also, thank you.

The book in question is Tolerance by Hendrik Willem van Loon (pronounced “loan”). I was rummaging around a neat little bookstore a while ago when I came across an interesting looking book. It seemed very old. The pages were all staggered and uneven and there was nothing on the cover. I was intrigued. The binding of the book only read “Tolerance – van Loon”. I opened the book and saw that it was from 1925. I’m still not sure if it’s a first edition, but it’s definitely from one of the first four printings, but that’s all beside the point. With books that old there’s obviously no description or synopsis to get a grasp of what the writing might be about. So I started reading the prologue. This is what I read:

“Happily lived Mankind in the peaceful Valley of Ignorance. To the north, to the south, to the west and to the east stretched the ridges of the Hills Everlasting. A little stream of Knowledge trickled slowly through a deep worn gully. It came out of the Mountains of the Past. It lost itself in the Marshes of the Future. It was not much as rivers go. But it was enough for the humble needs of the villagers…

The Old Men Who Knew were brought forth from the shady corners where they had spent their day, pondering over the mysterious pages of an old book. They mumbled strange words to their grandchildren, who would have preferred to play with the pretty pebbles, brought down from distant lands. Often these words were not very clear. But they were writ a thousand years ago by a forgotten race. Hence they were holy. For in the Valley of Ignorance, whatever was old was venerable. And those who dared to gainsay the wisdom of the fathers were shunned by all decent people…"

Woah. Cool. I purchased the book immediately and spent the next couple days trying to learn what I could about Hendrik van Loon. There’s not a whole lot of information on him in the internet realm though. All I could find out for sure was that he was a journalist and an historian. He was born in the Netherlands and eventually moved to America. Apparently he was a prolific author of sorts, but for Tolerance specifically I could find no information at all. But I read the thing just the same.

Despite the feel of the prologue the book is in fact a historical look at religious tolerance (or intolerance, as it were) throughout history, with a specific focus on Europe. The book starts in ancient Greece and shows the religious freedom that seemed to flourish with those cultures. Then, of course, darker times set in and the rest of the book seems to show how scared people were and how quickly they would sell each other out and torture each other simply because they didn’t pray the correct way. They truly were frightening times. But through it all there is a hint of optimism. Loon tells the stories of different rebels and religious free thinkers throughout Europe’s history who stood defiantly against religious intolerance.  Although most were exiled or killed, their works and philosophies were carried on and would always seem to find a revival long after their deaths and would often help to usher in new eras of tolerance and acceptance, if only briefly.

Van Loon also tries to touch on as many philosophical views from as many free-thinkers in each passing era in Europe’s history as he can. He gives interesting, albeit small, glimpses into what the minorities were thinking and how they managed to retain those views despite threats of prohibition, torture, death and extermination.

The book ends with van Loon saying that tolerance is something that will most likely take thousands and thousands of years for humanity to come to terms with. (Also, I’m not sure if it’s fortunate or unfortunate that the book was published in 1925, considering what was on the horizon for religious intolerance in Europe. But I’m sure van Loon wrote extensively on those events as they were to occur.) 

All in all it really is a tremendous read that I could never do justice in a small review like this. I would highly recommend it to anyone, religious or not. It’s a very important look as to where intolerance comes from and, when in the wrong hands and wrong minds, what it can be capable of making us silly little humans do.

An Open Letter to Marilyn Manson

Marilyn Manson has outlived his relevance. In the 1980’s and early ‘90’s there was a strong uprising in America within the Christian Right. They’d always been preoccupied about the “safety of the youth” but at this time it got to crazy levels. There was widespread panic that rock music was laced with messages from Satan telling children to do his deeds. Think about that – honestly sit and think about that implication. How absurd is that notion? How fantastically preposterous does that sound? And yet, millions of people were genuinely concerned about Satan corrupting our youth through music. Which, for the 1400’s would’ve been a commonplace idea, but this was in the 1980’s! Of course, it was the American media that played a big role in all of that. With a constant bombardment of stories about Satan’s secret messages, pornography driving youths to rape and murder and the constant scare of children getting into drugs it’s no wonder that people were worried. Of course, had they stopped and thought carefully about what the news was saying they would in fact see how absurd it all really was.

But in the early 1990’s there was a young journalist by the name of Brian Warner who realized that while America loved to keep their children safe, they themselves had malevolent attractions. Marilyn Manson, a name derived from Marilyn Monroe and Charles Manson, the two extreme social behaviours revered by Americans, was a fitting moniker for someone looking to shake things up. And that’s just what he did. Manson took all the fears and social ills of Americans and put them on display through his band, his live shows and of course through his music. This got him exactly the attention he was seeking. When parents would start calling Marilyn a Satanist and when they would accuse him of various misdeeds he always had an eloquent, cogent retort describing how what he was doing was in fact a mirror of what kind of world these parents were painting for their children. And throughout the ’90’s he was always there to provoke the average citizen while giving the youths a sort of folk hero to identify with.  Because Manson wasn’t part of the Reaganized America. He wasn’t an authority figure out to distort the facts. He wasn’t looking out for your best interests. He was an outsider looking at the world and telling you exactly what he saw. And despite what you may have thought of the music, in that time and place he fit perfectly. He was an absolutely necessary character; the anti-hero.

But this brings us into the new millennium. The PMRC has gone quiet. Parents, on a whole, aren’t worried about Satanic messages in rock music, because the media, for the most part, doesn’t report those kinds of stories anymore. The stories that are scaring Americans nowadays are about Muslims, immigrants, the Chinese or any other group of people not of the same colour as George Washington. Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly and the ilk are playing the same role the media did in the 1980’s with Satanic music, except today the topic of fear is terrorism from outsiders. People who we don’t understand hate us, so we should hate them back. And I do think that a musical folk hero is needed again. But it is not Marilyn Manson. He is irrelevant to the social atmosphere in America now. And I’m speaking about the character of Marilyn Manson, not the musician Brian Warner. Regardless of how you feel about his recent music, it seems ridiculous for him to continue using that moniker. Marilyn Manson, the character, was triumphant in the 1990’s. In the 2000’s he’s been needed less and less.

So the point of this letter is not to say Brian Warner should stop making music, but that the name “Marilyn Manson” should be retired. He fought a good fight. But now we need somebody else to step up and embody the fears of Americans today. And who knows? Maybe it’ll be Brian Warner under a new guise. In any case, Marilyn Manson, you were fantastic. But we don’t need you anymore.